As the title says, I've been editing this weekend. I think its fair to say that writing books is relatively easy, editing them is hard. You have to look at continuity, grammar errors, whether you changed Annie to Anna (and believe me I have). And no matter how much you look at it, no matter if it's been sent to an editor or not, you will always find something wrong.

I think that's the frustrating thing about being an self-published author. Even traditionally published and popular authors suffer from issues with poor editing, but unlike us self-pub types, the errors and poor editing that make it into their books, doesn't have the same impact that such errors would have on our efforts.

A missed formatting or grammatical error, because hiring a professional editor is out of our price range, has a massive impact on the reviews and impression of our books. True, there have always been cases where the utterly dire quality of the writing in a novel has boosted sales, as people want to see what the fuss is about, but generally, poorly edited works don't get the time of day.

So what's us poor self-pubbed types to do? Well in my case, I finish writing, then leave the text for a while, before I check it again. It then goes to my editor (and you need an editor - even if it's a fellow bookworm who can see the errors that you miss) After that, I make the changes requested, and I run it through grammarly, which is an online grammar checking program. (because affording a proof-reader is out of the question) I then leave it some more before checking it for a final time. For my current book, there's going to be another stage. I'm getting an ARC published, both ebook and paper. This will allow me to see my book as my readers will, and then I'll pick up some more issues.

It's a strange truth, that words look different on screen than they do on paper. I have read the same bit of text several times on the computer, but print it out, and everything alters.

So editing is key to everything, and as a consequence, it's the most frustrating stage of being a writer. It's easy to churn out a plot and some dialogue, but it's much harder to turn that sea of words into something understandable.

So that was my weekend, sat at my computer with soundtracks as my background music, trying to make sense of my book. I've added a chapter, deleted chunks of previously established character details, and I've still not finished.

But, editing is worth the pain, even when you miss some of the problems. This is partly the reason that Amber Sky is taking so long, I don't want to put out an inferior product.

The Amber Sky ARC will be ready soon, with the release date hopefully not long after that.​